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Daniel senses my bubbling enthusiasm and invites me to tour his school, The Florence Academy of Art, along the via Aretina on the city’s outskirts. To enter is to be drawn back centuries. The 100 artist-students, of all backgrounds and ethnicities, might be dressed in 21st-century casual, but one immediately sees Botticelli, Vasari and Nelli in their figures and faces. Some seem to be adorned in 16th-century robes of hemp, palette in one hand, Mahl stick to support the brush hand in the other, a parade of fine artists floating in the natural white light.
That was a little more than a year ago. Now students are separated by plastic, painting through some odd looking-glass in order to stay safe and healthy. The plague has been in these parts before, devastating, debilitating and deadly, but the art of Florence persisted then, as it does now, while the world slowly rights itself. For the moment, the school is not a place for visitors, so Daniel, master ....
Farther Afield: Art the Old-Fashioned Way Brian Allen Photograph courtesy of the Florence Academy of Art. I’ve been intrigued by the Florence Academy of Art in Italy for years. It’s a small, prestigious art school that revived the kind of education Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and George de Forest Brush had, as well as hundreds of other Americans who studied in Paris in the late nineteenth century. It’s an atelier and draws on teaching principles once used in the best French art schools but also by the Old Masters. I visited in September. There are 130 students from thirty-five countries occupying what was once an old customs house a short walk from the Arno River and the historical center of Florence. This year is its thirtieth anniversary. ....